Breastfeeding and Revolution, or Nursing as Biocultural Insubordination: Colostrum, Body and Caring

Abstract

This article discusses breastfeeding from a multidisciplinary approach, and vindicates its multidimensionality, diverging from the conceptual and experimental framework of the health sciences. Breastfeeding is claimed as a privileged field for female empowerment and social transformation, deepening in its specificity from the reflection on gender and economic dimension of ecological sustainability. Will be crucial here the reflection from ethics of care and inter-dependence, as well as criticism of the capitalist distinction public-private spaces, which carries a monetized conception of labour (generating huge traditional epistemological exclusions). It will be also defended breastfeeding on its dimension of social activism (lactivism) and politics of transformative intervention, and breastfeeding corporeality will be approached as a cultural dissidence within Western cultures. This research has been conducted mainly by ethnographical methodology, although the very object of the study has required an inescapably interdisciplinary approach.